


The Survivor, The Star, The Slayer and The Scholar

by alephthirteen



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Kara Danvers is shy, Lena Luthor Has Captain Kirk Energy But In a Nice Way, Lena Luthor Needs a Hug, Lena Luthor is a Ladykiller, Lena Luthor's sexuality is "aliens hot. girls hot. girl aliens...", Lena Luthor: Xenophile Extraordinaire, Protective Lena Luthor, Sci-Fi, We Want YOU For Space Army and Alien-Fucking, What Would Happen if Kara Joined the Science Guild
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:54:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22382911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: A Mass Effect remash using Supergirl characters and some of the SG plotlines, particularly the comic ones, in addition to ones from the game.   The Reaper War itself will not feature, though elements will be present.  The black-ops CERBERUS project and its more sinister twin CADMUS will feature heavily.Please note, this will not follow strictly 1:1 links to the game.  For example, Commander Lena Luthor's service history contains elements of Ruthless, Sole Survivor, and War Hero backgrounds.  Because we're not playing an RPG here, some things can be blended that otherwise were too separate by class, background, playstyle...
Comments: 58
Kudos: 38





	1. Candidate Selection

**Author's Note:**

> Mass Effect terminology:
> 
> "biotic" = A term for molecular, space-warping, and gravity manipulation abilities some organic species can possess if their bodies are infused with eezo. Typically boosted by implants. In some species (e.g. humans) such infusion correlates with high rates of cancer.  
> "eezo" = Element Zero, a unique mineral infused with dark energy, which has a negative mass and negative energy under certain conditions. It forms the basis of power sources used in FTL flight, force fields, and "biotic" implants.  
> "N7" = Alliance Navy Combat Rating 7, the rating given to an elite group of exceptional infantry. Similar to special operations (US Seals, British SAS, Russian Spetznas) in our world.
> 
> Military terminology, ranks, and slang:
> 
> AOE = Area of Operations  
> FNG = Fucking New Guy  
> FUBAR = Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition  
> Lt. (Lieutenant) = A junior officer in charge of a small group of enlisted soldiers. Might be just-commissioned typically operate as stand-ins for more senior officers not present (as in "in lieu of").  
> Lt. Cmdr. = A junior officer in charge of a small group of enlisted soldiers. More experienced than a lieutenant, they are able to make decisions that deal with complex situations and tie their unit's actions into the goals of the nearby forces.  
> Mst. GySgt = Master Gunnery Sargent, the highest enlisted rank in the Marines. Refers to someone who has extensive knowledge of weaponry and tactics and is capable of leading a company (approx 100 troops) in combat situations.  
> Private = The lowest enlisted rank in the Marines.

**Pvt. Larry "L. R." Jenkins**

**(System Alliance Marine Corps, N5 overall rating with a pending N6 ground combat)**  
  


The chatter abounds. The ship he's on is unlike any he's been assigned to before. Small, cramped and clearly experimental. Marines will rotate through bunks and only the ship's doctor, navigator, captain, and the first officer have anything like private space. As the shuttle brought them close to the ship's belly, someone turned the viewscreens off.

Just before they went to static, Larry saw plasma conduits light up in a long, straight line running bow to stern. No way it's anything but the main cannon, mounted and powered just like it would be on a dreadnought.

"Attention!" the officer barks.

Forty men and women snap together, rigid and rooted to the spot. A row of bolts driven into metal.

"Ma'am!" they shout.

A lanky woman in Alliance blues with a beret on her head walks down the line. She raps one marine -- a raven-haired girl so young this must be her first tour -- on the elbow. The recruit corrects her hold on her rifle, eyes fixed dead ahead on an empty bulkhead.

On it goes.

Finally, she stops in front of Larry.

"Clip," she grumbles. "Sort it out."

Turning only his eyes, he sees that he had the thermal clip disengaged. Last he checked, boarding the ship with a loaded, powered weapon was a breach of regulations.

"Ma'am! Permission to lock and load?"

She nods.

Stepping back so she can address the whole company, the officer speaks.

"This mission is the most important one the Alliance has undertaken in our lifetimes but it _did not happen,_ ladies and gentlemen. You die, no one hears about it. Your family gets a letter. You kill a hundred Krogan with just your dick, no one hears about it. You make up some shit in the bar on shore leave. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Sound off!" she shouts.

"Hoo-rah!"

"Fall out. Dustoff in ten."

As he walks away, Larry makes a point of looking at her nameplate in the mirror-shiny cabinets of the mess hall. It's always good to know who the XO is. The captain's job is to inspire. Hers is to terrify.

"Lt. Cmdr A. Danvers." He mumbles. "Short for Alicia?"

A combat knife flies six inches past his head and right into a banana in the pantry.

Danvers walks over, grabs the now-halved banana and retrieves her knife.

"Need to know, soldier. Need to fucking know. Clear?"

"Ma'am."

She hands him half the banana.

"Any other place, I'd say smart move, dropping the clip. Next time, read your damn orders."

"Aye-aye."

\----

**Admiral Steven Hackett**

**(Fleet Admiral, Systems Alliance Navy)**

Councilor Udina sits across the table, seething.

"I don't see what he's doing here. Or her."

The Turian and the Asari sip their beverages -- Palevanian smokeroot tea and Serrice Ice brandy -- and ignore the most powerful human alive.

"The _Normandy_ is a joint project. Everyone has a stake in her," the Asari begins.

"Human shipyards built it," Udina snaps. "Who the fuck are you, anyway?"

"Moisa T'Dura," she sighs. "SPECTRE T'Dura. Meaning I can put a bullet in your skull and all your friend here can do is file a request to clean the office."

Udina swallows his next complaint. It was about the cut of her all-leather combat uniform.

_Damn thing looks like a stripper costume._

"The main cannon is a prototype from the Turian navy," the turian adds. "The stealth system was a joint Drell-Quarian-Vorcha effort, believe it or not."

"Vorcha?" Hackett asks.

The Asari chuckles.

"One family in particular, but yes. A religious sect that feels they must be connected to their roots as hunters. Three generations worked on it, passing research father, to son, to grandaughter to offset their short lifespans."

"Get to the point," Udina grumbles.

"We have wanted to put up a human candidate for the SPECTREs for twenty years," Hackett sighs. "As you well know, Councilor."

"However…"

The Turian pipes up this time, his mandibles flexing and his baritone filling the room.

"SPECTRE candidates are selected by the council alone. Their wisdom guides our selection, training and assignments. Not even the current corps may make a recommendation. Now, though, we have a request from the council."

Hackett's gray eyebrow arches.

"Luthor."

The Asari nods.

"Rather a singular woman. She is born penniless. Dying at age four from extreme eezo poisoning, she is sold to a wealthy family for a pet or experimentation or some other goddess-fucked fate. Befriends their son. Earns their respect. Enlists at seventeen. Her first posting, her unit walks into a thresher maw. Only she survives."

"I know her file!" Udina snaps. "Hackett, you listen close...you will get these _things_ out of your office. Now."

T'Dura reaches to her thigh holster, removes a gleaming white shotgun and lays it on her lap. The whole thing is curves and cool blue power cores that don't whine or buzz, they _purr_ and at the tip is a seething mass of dark energy. It's as if a gun had been designed for sex appeal.

"These _things_ are speaking with the grownups, Councilor. Admiral," she purrs. "If you would."

Hackett nods.

"Third tour of duty, Luthor is on Torfan when the Batarians hit it. She counterattacks with half a platoon. An obvious suicide mission. Medivac finds her and four surviving men in the middle of a slaughterhouse. The moment they get her lungs patched, she spends an hour searching the bodies to retrieve her "lucky" combat knife. Pieces of it, at least, and from six different corpses. Because she kept swinging."

"Fourth tour, she is on Elysium when the pirate fleet hits it. Not only does she hold the line there but the instant the guns come back on, she takes three civilian shuttles and six dozen marines to Minidor. Frees all but two of the survivors."

T'Dura nods.

"Courage. Leadership. Tenacity. Resilience. All the best traits of a SPECTRE and this woman's _entire life_ has forced her to develop those, or die trying."

\-----

**Dr. Kara Z'Rel**

**(Assistant Professor, Armali University, Three-Time Recipient of Republic Honors for Innovation and Knowledge)**

  
  


"Goddess, this is amazing!" Kara shrieks at the uncaring, uninterested walls of the chamber.

She taps a few more buttons on the control surface. The Prothean AI reappears, this time the audio is garbled but the holograph is crystal clear. She grabs her datapad and makes a note.

 _Some combination of those will make it work,_ she tells herself.

Her communicator crackles.

"Z'Rel, respond. Dusk in ten minutes. Get your shiny ass up to the surface, kid."

It's not that she doesn't like Dr. Grant--she does--is that's she doesn't know what to do with her, or maybe humans in general. With lives that short, they should be more like Vorcha or Salarians and yet it seems half of them are as philosophical as a matriarch and the other half as oversexed as a maiden on a red sand binge.

Human males make even less sense and make her feel like taking a second shower.

She reaches for the radio.

All around her, a spherical forcefield lights up. She grabbed the control sphere instead of her radio.

"Oh no," she groans.

Judging by the power levels left in the cell, she is going to be on Therum for a very long time.


	2. Taking Command

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena Luthor likes them big and scaly, we can safely presume Lillian is up to no good, catcallers are not prepared for biotic attacks, and Lena is soft and worried for her space-dinosaur girlfriend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was thinking through exactly how adventurous of an alien-fucker Lena Luthor is and I realized that there was some uncharted erotic territory since  
>   
> A) we don't know what female Krogan really look like since we've only met one and she was in ceremonial garb  
> B) fucking the largest, buffest gay woman possible would be sort of a point of pride for Lena Luthor, no matter the AU  
> C) if Lena was once one of Lillian's science experiments, she probably kidnapped alien youngsters too
> 
> **CODEX ENTRY H002.1 | LuthorCorp and the Orphan Project, currently "HyrdaTech (tm)"**  
>  The "genetic gold rush" on Earth following the widespread use of gene-altering and artificial tissue printing in the 2140s resulted in a series of laws limiting changes to non-microbial life forms but before that, it made LuthorCorp the largest human-owned corporation in council space. Their current product lines depend heavily on medical nanites, implanted stem cell 'glands', and various tissue-altering implants for purposes ranging from tumor removal to cosmetic enhancements. Following their successful "saving the sickest girl alive" ad campaign, they launched their HydraTech implants, which are intended to rapidly repair any and all non-fatal traumas to the wearer's body using nanites and cloned cells to reprint tissue using any nearby amino-acid-life compatible chemicals. Following the product launch, the child used in the campaign sued for emancipation in order to enlist. Lillian Luthor, the widow of the founder decided to adopt the girl, then known as Patient 17, into her family. She simply said "Lex always wanted a sister and now he has Lena," when asked if it was appropriate for her to be suing for custody of what had previously been a patient in a double-blind study.

**(Cmdr. Lena Luthor)**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla, assigned to X-FRG-04 during shakedown)**

**(N7 Ground Combat Rating, N7 Covert Rating, N5 Atmosphere/Space vehicle piloting rating, N2 ground vehicle piloting rating)**

Lena wakes with something warm and damp and huge clamped around her.

_Ah, yes._

She has her definitely-fuckable, possibly-lovable, completely adorable semi-girlfriend sprawled all over her. She rolls over carefully, slipping between the Asari stripper's skinny, purple arms to fully face Vehyr.

Plateless, smooth-scaled and slender, Vehyr is nothing like a male Krogan but for her sheer bulk. Her stance is more upright and where a male has a hump, she simply has a small flare of muscle. Forearms thicker than Lena's thigh curl around her middle and Vehyr's hot, moist breath cascades across Lena's bare back. Cold-blooded thing she is, the water in her breath is slightly cooler than the room. Refreshing.

Lena can close her eyes and imagine she's fucking a human bodybuilder or open them and realize that the hand clamped oh-so-protectively over her is the result of four billion years of brutal evolution. Not many things survive Tuchanka. Not many can. Krogan, thresher maws and varren thrive there. The most lethal living things alive. The males can die, in theory, once the deed is done. The mother cannot.

"Morning," Lena trills, snuggling her head into the crook of the neck. Vehyr huffs and spreads a big hand across Lena's hip, dragging her up and across with one slow pull.

"Why do you leave me?" Vehyr whines.

"Because I have to. To protect you."

Vehyr snorts.

"If something invades this little shit of a station, I'm the last thing it'll see."

"I've no doubt, but you know my mother."

The reflexive growl starts deep, deep, deep in Vehyr's lungs and rattles her bones.

"I meant that _syguh_ oath, you know. I swore she would die slow, choking on her own blood for what she has done to you."

Lena kisses the dome of Vehyr's head.

"I know. My job is to get her first. You've suffered enough. We both have."

Lena turns back to look at their playmate but she's gone, as is her faux commando leathers and the small collection of eezo-senstive sex toys she brought over.

They never exchanged names. Lena met the girl's eyes across the club, slapped a lift field on her and pulled her straight from the stage into Vehyr's lap. 

"She left. I didn't hear a damn thing. Is that a biotic power?" Vehyr wonders.

"I can assure you it's not."

"Yeah, you are a screamer."

Casting her eyes around for her clothes, Lena sees only scraps. Even the civilian grade kinetic weave is warped and stretched out. Vehyr was not in the mood to wait and the only clothes that she couldn't just rip open were the mil-spec armor.

"Maybe that's why they call it going commando," Vehyr jokes.

Lena rolls her eyes.

"Doing this the night before deployment was a mistake," Lena sighs. "Because now I don't want to leave."

"No, Lena, taking a command based on the orders of an officer whose name was redacted out, on a ship with a redacted name, for an unspecified mission is a _mistake_. This was just having some fun."

"If anything goes wrong at work…" Lena worries.

Vehyr squeezes her meaty wrist.

"QEC is right where you left it, lover. Besides, I'm too useful to kill."

"Your supervisor thinks so, I'm sure. Mother never met someone who was anything more than tubes, meat, marketable trace chemicals and samplable genetics. You should be getting some parcels at work soon. Strap them on, door to door, okay babe?"

"Ooh, can't wait."

  
  


Lena doesn't remember when she started taking the public tram to the hangar, but it was somewhere around her second tour. 

Wars tend to make the news, so before she ships out, she watches the news.

A pair of beat up, heavily modded aug-reality visors are linked to her omnitool. They look like something a street rat snatched, repaired with scrap and clung to the rest of her life.

A pair of sweatpants covers the hardsuit. Her messenger bag with the personal effects is slung over her right hip with the towel in the other pocket cushioning the pistol from commuters who bump into her. Her hoodie is inside out, so no one can see the crimson and white N7 logo. 

The guy who grabbed her ass sprained his hand on the plating and learned a quarter second later exactly how poorly he chose his targets. The drool is hiding most of the blood coming out of his mouth.

His dentist will think it was any ordinary infection. Infections don't hurt nearly as much as warp-burn as it rips tissues apart.

  
  


* * *

"The ExoGeni Corporation is in court today, responding to a lawsuit from the Academy of Thessia, claiming that its mining operations on several sub-habitable planets are threatening important archeological digs."

* * *

"Asari councilor Livia Tevos spoke to the United Nations via vid-link this morning, congratulating humanity on its thirtieth year in the galactic community. She did not take questions from the audience."

* * *

"An influx of injured refugees and armed deserters from the Terminus systems has led to a temporary state of martial law in three of the Citadel's docking bays."

* * *

"Systems Alliance military continues to deny the existence of the so called CADMUS program of anti-alien research. Though repeated inspections show that CERBERUS operates within galactic law, many point out that the revelations about the existence of CERBERUS suggest that darker, still-secret initiative is possible. Turian and Salarian politicians condemned the reports of experimentation on sentient prisoners. Asked for comment about the possible sister program to his own, program lead Lex Lu-"

* * *

  
  


Lena pulls the transmit chip out of the headset so hard she cracks it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WORLD-BUILDING NOTES:
> 
> #1 I don't think the female Krogan should look so much like the males. Everything about the Krogan is evolutionary pressure. For ancient Krogan, a male being able to head-butt an apex predator before it reached his mate was useful. His mate, on the other hand, needed to keep up with several young monsters at once, be tough, hard-to-spot, have excellent senses and high endurance. So she would not have a use for large, bright-colored, calorie-wasting bone plates or a hump primarily used in dominance rituals with males. She would need to be more versatile, probably have longer arms and legs proportionally, have bigger hands to catch escaping toddlers. In birdwatching terms, Wrex is the big, red, flashy male cardinal, a female cardinal is brown, boring-looking and good at keeping an eye out. I can tell a male cardinal anywhere. I can never really tell which small brown bird is the female cardinal and that's the way evolution wants it.
> 
> #2 I've decided that the N-rating for combat has equivalent N-ratings for stealth work and piloting, engineering, and so on, all running N1 to N7. The term "N7" still refers to special ops as it was infantry that first used the system and N7-qualified soldiers in the First Contact War who brought the term into public use.  
> In this system, N1 basically means you won't accidentally grab it sharp-side first. Someone who is N3 at say, cargo shuttles, can fill in for a co-worker. Someone who is N7 on shuttles can throw some cargo netting over their shoulder, grab a joystick, jump in something with half a wing, one thruster and some leaking fuel cells and take off. Anyone who's played the original Mass Effect knows that calling the Mako's piloting "N2" is probably generous!


	3. Crew, Family, and Other Things That Kill You (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena meets her second-in-command, Alex knows how to handle leathernecks, What is a Winn?, Lena is a bit by-the-book for SPECTREs, Dr. Z'Rel geeks out with a computer, something goes terribly wrong, and Dr. Catherine Grant has words with a pencil-pusher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mass Effect Canon Notes:
> 
> The "Carnifex" is the heaviest-damage pistol commercially manufactured and is one of the few sidearms useful against megafauna such as Krogan. It is a favored weapon of biotics, police forces, and as a backup weapon for big game hunters.
> 
> Slang:  
> "Conn" - term for the bridge of a submarine.  
> "Mikes" - minutes
> 
> Acronyms:  
> QEC=Quantum Entanglement Communicator. This expensive technlogy creates a secure, unjammable connection between two points by using two clusters of entangled particles. This allows real-time, instant communication between any two points, although the receivers must be paired and must be physically moved to their locations.  
> XO=Executive officer, the second in command on a ship.

**Cmdr. Lena Luthor**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla, assigned to X-FRG-04 during shakedown)**

**(N7 Ground Combat rating, N7 Covert rating, N5 Atmosphere/Space piloting rating, N2 Ground piloting rating)**

Lena thumbs the thermal clip for her Carnifex back in and puts her thumb to the doorpad's scanner.

"Genetic signature recognized. Luthor, Lena. Commander. Systems Alliance Navy, Marine Division. Specialization: biotic and electronic warfare. Service histor-"

"Mute!" Lena snaps.

She needs to check in with her XO, drop her gear in her cabin and hit the med bay. She should do that last one first but she has her orders. 

A flare of pain travels down her right arm, shoulder to fingertips, and following it is a flare of dark energy. Lena holds out her right hand and a network of micro-singularities pop off and the energy solidifies into something much like an omnitool's flash-forged blade.

She fists her hand and it becomes a hammer.

"Lex, you glorious bastard."

"Stand by, unauthorized power surge detected…" the system reports.

Lena lowers her arms and sighs.

She clicks her tongue and guides her eyes to the target in her retina overlay.

A dozen different pieces of LuthorCorp tech went in her body to save her life and the Alliance has put in two dozen more, all at her request. All but two are registered, properly controlled, and legal. One is the command and control system to backdoor all the others, just in case the brass tries to remotely detonate her. The other is a series of QEC comm packets paired to the few friends she has.

[Thank you, Lex. I've never stabbed someone with space-time before...]

[Any time, sweet sister. If I come up with any other crazy ideas, you'll be the first to know. I've thrown a few more red herrings at mother's feet. Bought your scaly friend some time, at least. We need a plan, though. A real plan.]

[Ask Sam. She has plans.]

[Fine! If you're trying to hook me up with her…]

[Perish the thought, Lex. She's genetically perfect, remember? You have male pattern baldness, if I recall.]

[You wound me.]

[It's always grown back before. I love you, Lex.]

[Love you too, sis.]

"Access granted," the airlock reports. "Welcome aboard, commander."

Lena steps into the hold.

"Officer on deck!" someone shouts.

She casts her eyes across the assembled company.

_ Even after Torfan, they gave me one hundred men. Fools. _

"Danvers?"

A redhead steps out from the end of one column, salutes better than Lena did at her Star of Terra ceremony, and holds out a data pad.

"Crew complement?"

"Thirty-four navy, eighteen defense bots, one hundred and four marines, counting me and you, ma'am. Since you are cleared to know it, I should add that we have two SPECTREs. Asari and Turian."

Lena's eyebrow arches.

"Really?"

"Yes, they want to speak with you in the comm room."

"Very well. Run these men hard, Danvers. If they pound ground, it will be because this mission went tits-up. If they stay on the ship, they need to earn their keep. I want nine-hour rest cycles, three hours PT, three hours marksmanship, three hours PT, three hours on specialties."

"In that order, ma'am?" Danvers asks.

"Yes. They need to be able to do the complicated parts exhausted. An engineer who can shoot but not rewire a panel when she's fried? Dead. Along with her unit."

"I'll see to it personally, ma'am."

Lena nods.

"Who's the XO?"

"I am, ma'am."

"Splendid. Catch me in ninety mikes, at the conn. I want a dry test of the Tantalus system  _ before  _ we undock. If control complains, tell them a SPECTRE ordered it."

Danvers marks all of it down on her pad and salutes.

"I'll go tell Winn."

"What's a Winn?"

"He's like an autopilot, but irritating."

"I will take your word for it."

She heads towards the comm room, wondering why the fuck the Council put two of their assassins on her boat.

  
  



	4. Crew, Family, and Other Things That Kill You (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena meets her second-in-command, Alex knows how to handle leathernecks, What is a Winn?, Lena is a bit by-the-book for SPECTREs, Dr. Z'Rel geeks out with a computer, something goes terribly wrong, and Dr. Catherine Grant has words with a pencil-pusher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blended Canon Notes:
> 
> Difference #1 -- Rather than Liara T'Soni who is out of touch with her mother, Kara Z'Rel maintains a relationship with her mother, Alura Z'Rel who is High Adjudicator and thus the laywoman in command of the Justicar Order.  
> Difference #2 -- The Asari have curse words. Salty ones, too!  
> Difference #3 -- At least one Prothean survivor must exist or has existed recently for Alura Z'Rel to have bonded with one.  
> Difference #4 -- The high emphasis on genetic purity displayed here is a trait of the Kett from Mass Effect; Andromeda but I feel it fits the Protheans as well, since we see them have near-religious reverence for biology.  
> Difference #5 -- Kara (Liara) received the Prothean cipher not Lena (Shepard).
> 
> Similarity #1 -- Kara has never met her "father."  
> Similarity #2 -- The Protheans studied and meddled with the ancient Asari.

**Dr. Kara Z'Rel**

**(Assistant Professor, Armali University, Three-Time Recipient of Republic Honors for Innovation and Knowledge)**

Reaching just one finger towards the right-hand control sphere, Kara taps. The AI comes online and spews yet more unintelligible Prothean at her.

_ How is it we don't know their language? _

"I don't understand you!" she shouts.

A panel on the console dissolves -- she loves watching the Prothean's technology in action -- revealing what can only be an autosurgery suite.

"You want me to…"

The AI responds with the standard recorded message.

She's hungry, she's thirsty and it'll be two more days before Cat's people come looking for her. It's what she liked most about professor Grant's digs. A longer leash for her to follow her instincts.

"By the Goddess' gash," Kara groans. "Why not?"

She sticks her hand into the gap and the machine wastes no time. Her palm is sliced and three articulated tubes plunge into it, ripping out tiny chunks of flesh. The tubes retreat and some sort of gel is sprayed onto the wound.

By the time she can pull her hand out, it's healed. Even the rash she had been developing from dehydration has been rectified.

_ Medigel treatment of a completely unknown species? It must have mapped my genetics...in seconds. _

"Amazing."

Two more control spheres extend from the panel. Unlike the others, these are not projections. Instead of hard light, they are some damp-looking metal or ceramic compound. Almost like two living things.

"What would mother say?" Kara sighs. "She'd say that as a Z'Rel, I have a duty to be the best of us. That my foremothers built Armali, Sirta. She'd even probably tell me they built Thessia itself. Don't be a fool, Little Wing."

It's her father's advice that will work here...because she's never met them. Species, gender, whether they're alive or dead. She has no idea. Meaning that they certainly would agree with Kara. Right?

Kara grabs one globe in each hand and her muscles seize up.

Images and scents and sounds bombard her.

She's in someone else's body. 

**Finding the nearest pane of glass, she checks her reflection. Two arms ending in three-fingered, clawed hands. Long legs. A nose so keen she can smell a forest even though the city she's in stretches past the horizon. A wide skull a bony flare above the eyes. A toothy mouth with a neat row of flat, slicing teeth. Four big yellow eyes with strange, almost triangular pupils. Two eyes facing front and two at the edges of the flare. She can see almost all of her surroundings and farther into the spectrum at both ends. Her still-Asari brain aches at the sheer quantity of information.**

**A torso not so unlike an Asari, but for the broader shoulders and a bulge of muscle on the front of her chest and a long bundle down her back. In the right gown, with a mask, she could cut as graceful a figure as any matriarch, although the lack of separation, scales and nipples might give away the game before the night is done.**

**At least two other body types make up the crowd.**

**_Tri-gendered, maybe? I'm a predator. A hunter. At least now we know what they looked like._ **

**"Middle Dynasty," she mumbles, turning her head to take in the city's skyline.**

**"Catava!" Kara calls, pulling the name from memory.**

**Another Prothean runs up and grips her hands.**

**More images. More memories. Laughter. Embraces. Nude bodies pressed together.**

**_They're telepaths,_ ** **she realizes.**

**"You wandered off, slave."**

**_Slave?_ **

**Kara's mind reels. She always suspected some of the near-worship of Prothean culture was inaccurate but slavery? These people built the mass relays. Surely they had an automated labor force?**

**"I beg mercy, mistress."**

**Catava leans forward, pressing her flare to Kara's.**

**"No need, sweet. I know you hate these. Come! Before my father notices."**

**Hand in hand, Kara swims in memories of her time with Catava.**

**_They're lovers, slave or not,_ ** **she decides.** ****

**Catava was lonely. Sickly, as a little girl. Kara was the paragon of good health, so she was bought from a market. A truly unseemly market. Perhaps this is less than fully legal. Night after night, they pressed their bare bodies together so Catava's could lift genetics and enzymes and material from Kara's. Heal herself.**

**Only so long two young girls could lay naked in each other's arms, with Kara's lullabies and her strength seeping into Catava, saving her life before something more happened. It was toothy and aggressive and blood was drawn and the memory is hazy, probably from a bit of injected venom.**

**It was still a first kiss.**

**"I made lunch. Your favo-"**

The vision ends.

"Cruel," Kara complains. "They were about to talk about food!"

"Do you require rations?"

Kara's head jerks up. In her surprise, she flares her biotics so hard the bubble shield wavers and sizzles.

"Yes. Do you know how?"

The AI  _ looks  _ like a Prothean now, rather than a mass of static. The projection nods.

"Your body is sufficiently Prothean for me to surmise your needs, yes."

"What?" Kara wheezes. "Prothean?"

Another nod.

"Your baseline genetics are from primitive species Ainata-8. Marked for study due to neural linking, pheremonic, locomotive and mental sexual abilities and dark energy organ potential. Recommended for use in diplomatic, infiltration and biological warfare."

"You studied us," Kara realizes.

The projection dips its head.

"Yes, Jaito."

"Jiato?"

"Your nearest Prothean ancestor. Those of Prothean blood must never take the names of slaves. However, you are still pure enough for me to create injectable nutrients."

_ Their rule must have been hideous... _

"How?"

The projection stutters.

"Conjecture: the neuro-synchronous reproduction process of Ainata-8 would allow a female of that race to take on sufficient Prothean material to create a hybrid offspring."

"That's not how Asari reproduction works."

"It is," the projection replies. "It's how we built you."

Kara faints.


	5. Crew, Family, and Other Things That Kill You (Part 3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena meets her second-in-command, Alex knows how to handle leathernecks, What is a Winn?, Lena is a bit by-the-book for SPECTREs, Dr. Z'Rel geeks out with a computer, something goes terribly wrong, and Dr. Catherine Grant has words with a pencil-pusher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In no universe does Lena have self-confidence, poor dear.

**Cmdr. Lena Luthor**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla, assigned to X-FRG-04 during shakedown)**

**(N7 Ground Combat rating, N7 Covert rating, N5 Atmosphere/Space piloting rating, N2 Ground piloting rating)**

  
  


Lena can't remember the last time she was unsettled on duty. Unsettled is for home. Unsettled is for moments when something terrible could happen to people she cares about. 

She doesn't matter. She's a soldier. If there's a bomb between her and Vethyr, Lena will grab the trigger, tuck the demo charge to her chest and light it up.

These two SPECTREs, though, they unsettle her. 

The Turian's gait is lazy. His military superiors probably called him "unprofessional" but then again, the council saw something in him beyond what the Hierarchy did. He's carrying probably three-quarters of a million creds of weapons and armor. All of it black and silver, emblazoned with the winged shield of the SPECTREs. What looks like a modified-chamber Carnifex on his left hip, a gigantic shotgun better sized to a Krogan than anything and a Black Widow sniper rifle that even collapsed must have a three-foot length.

The Asari's slouch in the chair belies the fact that her passive barrier is enough to make Lena's hair stand on end and that the shield charge going across her leathers' woven-in emitter fibers must be equal to an orbital-drop hardsuit. Where the generator and battery are hidden in that skintight getup, Lena's not as sure. She carries a curvaceous shotgun of obviously Asari origin -- the markings on it are those of a religious text, if Lena recalls -- and a matching pistol. Slinky. Pearly white. Humming softly with live biotic energy at the end of the barrel. On each thigh, there's a sheath with the handle for what must be a telescopic sword or baton. 

She is also nearly invisible. So quiet and graceful that she might as well be an omnitool projection at half-opacity. Lena loses track of her twice between walking to the drink cabinet and offering her a drink. 

The smirk on the woman's lips suggests that she meant to do that. The slow bounce of her leather-clad foot in time to some tune in her head and the subtle grind of her thighs tells Lena that part of being above the law is no regs about fraternization.

"Permission to speak freely?"

Hackett's projection on the center QEC turns from his quiet conversation with the Asari which was in accented Sirtanna, no less. His last three sentences were half-nonsense but Lena would never have imagined he was even trying to learn the language. 

_Hobby_ , she decides. _They conduct military business in Thessalle, not city-state dialects._

"Granted." _  
_

"Why am I here, sir?"

"Because you're the best, Luthor. Because for the SPECTRE trials I offered the profiles of three hundred soldiers, private security, law enforcement, professional martial artists, and the council sent me one request. Quote, more info on Luthor, end quote."

"Yes...yes, sir," Lena finally manages.

The Turian turns his full attention to Lena.

"She does not approve," he decides.

"I do not," Lena agrees. "If I had wanted to be a hired killer, no rules and no code, I could have joined my mother's personal detail."

"That's not all we do, Commander. SPECTREs typically operate on their own initiative, pursuing threats as we discover them. Moises, what are your thoughts?"

The Asari's eyes are eerie, with a pupil and irises bigger than a human's. Barely any white in all that violet and black. Still, Lena can track her gaze.

Hands.

Holsters.

Face.

Only once she's finished checking for threats, do her eyes trace Lena's body, spending more than a moment on her chest.

"My eyes are up here."

Moises cracks. She starts giggling like a little girl. It's terrifying.

Finally, she's wiping unusually sparkly tears from her cheeks.

 _Freshwater aquatic ancestors,_ Lena reminds herself. _Her body isolates all salt._

"Probably a century since anyone told me off like that. I like her, Nihlus."

He lowers his head.

"Spirits preserve me."

Moises throws back the last of her bourbon.

"What's important is that she believes what she's saying. She's an honorable woman. Exactly what we need to take down CA-"

An alarm blares and the overhead lights go red.

Lena slaps her hand on her omntiool.

"Winn, status."

"Distress call from Eden Prime. Sensor logs and some audio. It's more chop than signal but we have sensor paintings of ships entering orbit. Destroyers. Maybe a cruiser."

Lena sucks in a sharp breath.

_Farming and resort colony with some puff-surgery clinics and a sandbox for rich brats to study archaeology. Softest target in human space._

"ETA?"

"One relay jump. Nineteen mikes. No other ships in range."

"Fire a volley of QEC-probes, get a flash-scan and then take us in. Top speed. Silent the moment we exit the relay. Fangs out, weapons free."

"Aye-aye."

"You want to keep that pilot's seat?" she snaps.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then I want my team dropping out of a clear sky, marine."

"You're jok- Yes, ma'am. On it."

Nihlus' mandibles quiver.

"This ship is a frigate class."

Lena flexes her hand over her pistol.

"This ship has almost three times the thrust-to-mass of a fighter, alternating kinetic barrier grids, we can run for eighteen hours sensor-invisible and our hull is painted with light-scatter coating. We have high-density point defense grids, both projectile and kinetic, we can dump all our heat into ejectable decoys and we carry a pulsed main gun and fifty delayed-thrust torpedos specially built to work with the stealth."

Moises nods.

"Kill, disappear, repeat. Basic commando tactics."

Hacket scratches his beard.

"You have permission to engage. But any warship needs to be christened before her first battle, Commander."

Lena grabs the untouched bourbon neat that was at Nilhus' seat. 

She pours it on the deck and then salutes.

"The SSV Normandy is reporting for duty, sir."

Hackett returns it.

" _Astris fortitudinis gloriam_ ," he reminds her. <"To the stars, with strength and honor." Latin, an extinct human language>

Lena pulls the wired control panel down from the ceiling and hits the ship-wide.

"This is the captain. All hands to battle stations. Brace for combat and hard maneuvers. All fireteams to the hangar, double-time!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a Normandy more in line with the beefed-up warship of Mass Effect 2 and 3, with upgraded weapons and a fully thought out approach. The Normandy in the first really had no business being out in the field, given that it had a killer feature -- the stealth drive and an insanely powerful reactor -- that opened tons of opportunities, but that had no synergy with the rest of the ship.
> 
> This is the Normandy if you built the ship after the stealth drive was lab tested. They figured out fun uses for all the extra power.


	6. Knives Out at Eden Prime (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CIC -- Combat Information Center. Located in the command deck, aft of the pilot, this has a galaxy map, tactical simulation systems, fleet communication systems, and workstations to control all the ship's weapons, electronic warfare, engine and damage-control systems. It is the place where all decisions in combat are made.
> 
> SAR -- Search and Rescue.
> 
> QEC -- Quantum Entanglement Communication. A technology that allows two electronic systems to communicate instantly between any two points in the universe. Typically used between high-security terrestrial installations, or between command and a flagship, they can, in theory, be used in any role (such as recon probes or communications or command-and-control bouys) where undetectable, long-distance communication is desired. 
> 
> XO -- Executive Officer. For the Normandy, this is Lt. Cmdr. Alex Danvers
> 
> "Looped Acceleration Chamber" -- Discarding the typical "longer barrel, smaller slug" approach to eezo-powered infantry weapons, a looped acceleration weapon uses a priming chamber shaped like a dense helix to provide the shell its initial spin-up and add velocity. The increase in power consumption is massive and the requirement for actual eezo to fuel such guns makes them expensive and impractical to equip entire armies with. That, in addition to the complexity it is why it has typically not been used in modern weapons. However, if paired with a normal length-barrel and proper superconductive coils and mass effect inertial manipulation technology to prevent-punch through during acceleration, it allows for significant increases in end-of-barrel velocity. If sufficient power is available, one shell can be accelerated in the helix while another is moving down the main barrel, increasing burst-fire speed.
> 
> CODEX:  
> In homage to the human homeworld, rather than using old nation-specific phonetic alphabets, Systems Alliance fire teams and companies and Latin-character phonetics are named after Earth wildlife, typically predators and venomous animals. 
> 
> Alpha->Bravo->Charlie | Alligator->Bear->Cobra

**MGySgt. Margaret Sawyer**

**(2nd Frontier Division, 212 Brigade, 171 days into rotation on Eden Prime)**

**(Combat ratings not in Systems Alliance Registry)**

  
  


Another barrage of shells enhanced with sheer weirdness sail over the concrete at the edge of the highway and slam into colonial administration's top floor. Not only does the backup barrier around the governor's office fail but the three top floors are also sheared off. Glittering blue robots scatter from the wreckage and start cutting at the building's walls.

The last volley didn't have those. 

All she knows is that the attacker likes loudspeakers, his voice is male and Turian and that he seems have somehow hacked a few thousand Geth to fight for him.

_Eden Prime is just a proving ground to this asshole._

"Fuck."

Maggie slams the receiver -- assuming that's what this is -- on the smuggler's "custom" hunting rifle back and forth. Servicewoman Bhatia holds said smuggler at riflepoint, the Avenger steady even one-handed. The flex of her bicep under the fibersuit and her ink-black hair reminds Maggie of other things. 

The sobs and moans of three wounded marines waft out of the family's barn. The secret chamber the smuggler made for his stash is shielded enough that it's the best place for the medic to work.

There's a reason Maggie gave Nirali the last functioning weapon in the platoon. She deserved better than a drunken dry-hump and she deserves to live long enough to apologize to Samesh.

This contraption was made in homage to some hair-brained pistol from centuries back, back before reliable firearms, when the number of barrels determined how long you'd live in a shootout. It's chromed and it's way too damn shiny for a warzone but the word on the street is that this is the gun that put a hole in the barracks' storage shed. 

Problem is that all the things Maggie knows about guns are from modern weapons, not museums, so she feels like she's trying to eat dinner with a sock rather than a fork.

"I oughta shoot you for designing this shit," she snarls.

"I'm sorry," the smuggler babbles.

His daughter dives out her bedroom window and tucks in beside Maggie before the enemy snipers can spot her. She's all freckles and joints. Fifteen tops.

"Here, ma'am. Let me."

The kid flips open some kind of catch and reveals the accelerator rings, ammo block, and power core. Inside, the design is gorgeous. It's also unplugged. There are three power cores and only one is inserted.

"Compatible with standard military parts," she explains. "May I?"

Maggie hands over two of her rapidly-dwindling supply of cores. The kid sockets them in, seals them up, and taps something in on the keypad on the inside of the latch.

"Good to go, ma'am. I set it to the standard one-tenth-gram. You should be good up to about point-oh-six."

"Lightspeed?"

"Yeah. That was my record, anyway. Hope you brought a spare thermal clip."

_Jesus. Not sure that's safe in an atmosphere._

This gun is now the sexiest thing Maggie's ever seen. All chromed and slick and the collapse on the stock is levered, not telescopic. Has a nice soft curve to it.

"How?"

"Looped acceleration chamber before the barrel. Like the old particle accelerators on Earth. I wanted extra credit in physics class."

"You ever think about joining, kid? Engineering could use you."

The kid grins.

"Without my gadgets, how would the local economy survive?"

Maggie settles low against the barrier and scans the treeline.

A Geth sniper trains back on her, his red laser rapidly climbing to its mark.

Maggie pulls the trigger and despite all the recoil compensators, she feels her boots scrape backward into the muck.

_Sexy._

The sniper is gone, as is the top half of the oak he was in, and the other trees in the grove were blasted flat in a V emanating from that point.

"Holy shit!" the girl chortles.

Bhatia drops her radio kit next to the kid's feet.

"You're pretty smart, little lady. Think you can get us a clear signal to the Alliance?"

"Why not? Not like I got school today…"

The blue flare of a plasma mortar pops over the horizon. Maggie glances over her shoulder. It's targeting the barn meaning that doc, Cole, Jin and Moralez are good as dead.

"Lockup!" Maggie shouts towards the barn.

"Down!" Bhatia shouts, throwing herself over the kid.

Just before their armor welds itself shut, she reaches one hand out for Maggie.

* * *

  
  
  


**Cmdr. Lena Luthor**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla, assuming command of** **_SSV Normandy_ ** **)**

**(N7 Ground Combat rating, N7 Covert rating, N5 Atmosphere/Space piloting rating, N2 Ground piloting rating)**

  
  


Lena watches the slowly rotating projection in the center of the CIC. 

The QEC-enabled probes have flash-scanned the system and jumped to random points out of the system for later retrieval.

Any dreadnought commander in the fleet would kill his mother for that tech but she's standing on the only ship that has it. The only ship that can do a damn thing. Every second she waits here, civilians are dying or being taken as slaves on Eden Prime but if she doesn't have a plan, no one is getting rescued. The Fifth Fleet dispatched a dreadnought, heavy cruiser and their corvettes but the relay jumps needed and unusually high congestion in Arcturus mean their earliest arrival is nineteen hours from now.

She taps her omnitool.

"XO Danvers, CIC. Double time."

_Two destroyers blocking the relay. Batarian spaceframes. Easy. Normandy drops out, eezo-brakes to port, nails the smaller one with the main gun. GARDIAN and the starboard dorsal missile pod take care of the rest. Drop three torps for good measure, VIs set to engage-if-needed. If we start getting toasty, eject a heat-sink decoy. Only thing the other ships will see is the explosions._

Lena types these orders in and Winn displays a flight path and windows of opportunity to fire. She scrolls the projection further.

"Solid plan, Flight Lieutenant."

He scoffs, though she’s learning his ways and manners. That one was actually grateful.

"XO reporting."

"The approach to the planet, Danvers. How would you do it?"

Danvers raises a cinnamon-colored eyebrow.

"Ma'am, even with the new loadout -- which has never been used in combat, I remind you -- this ship is severely outgunned for this encounter. Quite honestly, as XO, I would recommend stealth insertion and retreat."

Lena shakes her head and enlarges the cruiser.

_That's a problem. The cruiser is Turian. Looks like an early build of the Type 9. Meaning its either a disavowable Heirarchy op using old gear or re-fanged military surplus and pirates. That's not cheap, takes friends in high places and I can count on some experienced soldiers._

"Geosync orbit over the largest population center. See her angle?"

Danvers' eyes go wide.

"Her broadside guns are trained on the planet," she realizes.

Lena nods.

"No way to know if she's fired but if we're down there causing trouble, she will fry that city. Any competent Turian commander in their place would, given their mission. If that ship is stolen, any Batarian who hears my name would fry those civvies just for laughs."

Danvers pulls up an alternate version of the display at a smaller station.

"Shock and awe," she decides. "We drop all our remaining missile payload here, scatter-fire, here, here and here, target the ship defending it to port. We approach at top sublight velocity, go into an eezo-brake here, fire our main gun four times, wipe out the destroyer bracketing it."

"They're not expecting a ship this small to charge them. Looks like a kamikaze run to them. They'll waste a few seconds trying to figure out what the hell is the matter with us."

Lena smiles.

"History buff, eh?"

Danvers shrugs.

"We slide around the planet, drop our torp payload, reserving ten percent, just after we pass the edge of their sensor angles. Then we FTL to the edge of the system. They assume we've retreated. We sit there long enough for the stealth to adjust, come around, FTL jump right into knife-fight, come at her dorsally."

"Just before we shipped out from Jupiter Station to Arcturus, Donnelly in Engineering figured out a way to shunt some heat from stealth into the ammo chamber and redirect the reactor surge from FTL enter or exit into the main gun.”

“Means we get five or six hits with the main gun at say, a hundred-fifteen-percent velocity with a stream of superheated fluid rather than hard shells. Their barriers have to resist sustained stress and do so across five meters, not one point. No way they shrug off all of that. After a volley like that, we have to eject a heat sink or fry. Even then our gun cooldown is tripled but it doesn't matter. We kill it or it kills us. No round two."

Lena drums her fingers on her thigh holster.

"I like it. Our hull coating gives us a big edge against their lasers, our lasers are probably three times their density. GARDIAN lasers can free-fire but program the PDC cannons set to load fragmenting rounds and focus on thrusters, defense grid, anything that sticks out. The cruiser's broadside guns can't train on us without her spinning and she's slow. We dance away and the torpedos light up in waves, sweep around, crack her barriers, scrap her." 

Lena runs the simulation, plays with the variables to either extreme.

"Best we're going to get without the _Kilimanjaro_ and _Hawking_ fast response group jumping in and slagging them. Key it in, Winn. Drop a QEC probe mid-system and a command-and-control pod near the relay. All torps are programmed to stay cold until I say so and to power off if I give the all-clear. I keep control of the torpedo tubes. Transfer them to my omnitool."

"Ma'am?" Danvers asks.

"Element Zero and Antiproton weapons, Danvers. Strategic weapons whose use in combat is monitored by the Council. Which I plan to fire in orbit of a friendly planet. My responsibility. So it has to be my trigger finger."

Danvers nods.

"Which fire teams should I get ready to deploy, ma'am?"

"All of them. Qeutzal stays here, two in corridors to engineering and two here in CIC. They're crazy enough to defend the ship."

"I'll get the Scorpions' drive cores spun up and rig our drop pods for underbelly carry, ma'am."

Lena nods.

"Two drop zones. Marines to the city and the 212's barracks. My team to this cluster of farms near the university. The fact that it's intact tells me someone's made a line and held it. Danvers? You're coming with me. You, Jenkins, and the SPECTREs. You _are_ orbital drop qualified, correct?"

Danvers' lightly freckled face goes pale.

"I'll take that as a yes. As many cores and heat sinks as you can fit, weapons, medigel, two days rations. We're going to travel light, SAR any friendly assets for medevac, keep moving. Anyone from the Alliance that's operational we hand a weapon and find them something to kill. Let's go teach these inbred Batarian fuckers why they call me the Lioness of Minidor."

From her hiding spot near a blushing female midshipman, Moises T'Dura makes a cat-clawing gesture in the corner of Lena's vision.

"They also call me the Butcher of Torfan, you oversexed lunatic."

T'Dura slinks past Lena, caressing the curved stock of the shotgun on her thigh.

"Maybe both of those turn me on, you ever think of that?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Scorpions" are the Normandy's only fieldable support craft. 
> 
> A pair of A-61 Mantis gunships that Alliance Fleet Research, the Cerberus Project "Skunkworks" and Asari High Commands "Silver Shadow" labs tore down to the bolt and rebuilt to provide dockable, FTL-capable heavy fighters which could be loaded for fire support or mechanical work and fitted for any capital ship larger than a corvette. 
> 
> Approximately 30% longer than a Mantis spaceframe, they are fitted with miniature versions of the "Tantalus" drive core in the Normandy herself. 
> 
> In exchange for the rapid-fire main gun and the massive ammo magazine and bomb bay typical of a Mantis, they have superior kinetic barriers, a very dense GARDIAN laser defense grid including eight heavy UV lasers mounted in the nose and in lay-flat torrents that can be sealed into the hull magnetically. A light mass accelerator roughly equivalent to a Longbow class artillery piece is mounted dorsally, missile tubes are embedded in the wings, facing fore and aft. Other modifications include a short-range FTL drive and a wing layout that allows large weapon pods, utility pods or even troop-carrier pods to be carried under the body and powered off main systems. Because of a change in wing angle and overall outline, these pods do not affect maneuverability in atmospheric flight. 
> 
> Rather than carry the typical Kodiak shuttles for personnel drop and retrieval, the Normandy carries the Mantis and ten orbital drop, orbital ascent pods. A rebuild of a First Contact war design named "The Flying Brick", these heavily armored pods can survive re-entry and land and they can lift off, carrying their passengers to orbit. They lack any maneuvering besides that.
> 
>  **CODEX**  
>  Currently, the Scorpions are piloted by Eveline "Crunchy" Marcon and her twin sister, Josephine "Frog" Marcon. They claim their callsigns are derived from a sketch in an ancient Earth comedy vid called _Monty Python_ though no publically available copies exist. They may have seen them in a private collection.
> 
> Born to a well-to-do Parisian family, they had the best education and accommodations an Earth-born could hope for yet somehow became criminals by their early teens and enlisted at fifteen before Paris courts could indict them for an unspecified felony and their records are now sealed. 
> 
> Despite being the best heavy-fighter pilots in the fleet, they have both nearly been discharged for hostility towards each other and bad behavior on leave.
> 
> This includes one incident that the investigating officer described as "what happens when two lunatics drink the bar dry and fuck half a dozen Krogans" in a detailed and thoroughly salacious report. 
> 
> Eveline is currently under a restraining order from Nylat, a male turian working with Councilor Sparatus. As is her pattern of stealing her sister's past lovers, Josephine is linked to Nylat romantically as she allegedly is also pursuing Tivea, an assistant to the Asari councilor. Alliance Intelligence regards this as a "high probability / negligible damage" on their list of diplomatic incident risks.


	7. Knives Out at Eden Prime (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appear to be sick with, like some organic life forms are prone to, so postings will be short for a while.
> 
> Please mash "comment" to help me feel better.

**Flight Lt. Winslow Schott - Callsign "Joker"**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, Mars Shipyards, Pilot Training and Testing Group, posted to** **_SSV Normandy_ ** **)**

**(N7 Space and Atmosphere Piloting, N0 Combat, N1 Self Defense)**

Winn swings the Normandy's nose to port and acquires the signal of the Charon relay. Pluto is a million kilometers off. Earth, billions. The defense satellites swarmed around the relay acquire _Normandy,_ check her idents and then swing their guns away, back to the void around them.

His thumb scrolls the subliminal throttle and the Normandy leaps towards the relay at exponentially increasing speed it kicks, hard.

"Flight Lieutenant, you are in physical distress."

"Shut...up," Winn hisses.

The shackled AI at the next station boots up her hologram. Now the long-haired, sharp-eyed face staring back at him is like someone he once fell hard for on shore leave, scarily so. Siobhan Smythe, was the girl's name. When they fired it up in the dry-dock, the projection was a dead ringer for his kid sister. He was in the middle of a complaint when it just...switched.

_Why did it have to be a step-on-me brunette? Why, god, why?_

"BANSHEE, I'm...fine," he snarls.

"Please, inject the counteragent drugs, now."

_Fuck, she's right._

He pushes the button and fuzz worms its way into his brain and his hands stop hurting. He can move normally now. That's the tradeoff. Mental fuzziness for agile fingers and arms that can reach a high part of the panel without making him pass out. Every other person on this ship, except him, is fine with artificial gravity. He needs to take three-century-old drugs meant for in-atmosphere pilots to keep from stroking out or popping a vein.

"Nag."

"Tough guy," she shoots back. She leans on holographic arms and puts her holographic chin on her hands and winks it still works on him, damn it. "I'd miss you if you died."

"Comms are open, Joker."

"This is Flight. Engineering, dump grey hold and shunt all water to cooling. Countermeasures, we will initiate stealth at FTL exit. Missile bay, queue all tubes. Armory, check your commands. Fire control, set torpedos to control of _Normandy_ actual and implement ammo load Raven-Three. Damage control teams stand by."

After scarcely a heartbeat, Commander Luthor's voice rings over the comms.

"This is my ship, flight lieutenant. You address my crew as ranking only _after_ I say so. All stations implement the preceding orders. Condition one, I repeat, condition one. Marines to the hangar bay. Scorpion team, preflight checks. The-"

The sheer confidence with which the skipper gave the preceding orders makes her inhalation, small, but audible all the same, more affecting.

"The colony on Eden Prime is under attack. We are the only Alliance force able to respond. I am told you were handpicked because you're the best at your jobs. You are the smartest crew. For this, that won't matter. We are outnumbered, outgunned, and facing larger, more dangerous ships. You need to be the toughest. The bravest. Command out."

Winn looks to BANSHEE.

"She needs to work on her pep talks. I've had better from the VI at the Luna base."

"Not according to the transcript of her Star of Terra ceremony. It was often remarked on in her nomination."

Winn shrugs.

"Maybe she waits until things are shittier, before she acts like she cares."

"Open intercom, flight lieutenant."

"Fuck!" he hisses.

"PT at 0300, and schedule training with the XO."

"Fuck," he mutters.

"PT at 0100 and training with the XO and myself."

"I muted it before she could catch you again," BANSHEE teases.

"Count it down, craziness."

BANSHEE salutes mockingly.

"Board is green?" he asks.

"Check."

"Aligned?"

"Check."

"All stations secured for transit?"

"Check."

"You're getting the hang of it," she jokes. "Meatbag."

"Bite me," he grumbles.

"Gotta buy a girl a chassis first, and maybe dinner…"

=====

**Platform 2478**   
**(Local Geth consciousness is 1,314,648 processes)**

The relay is charging. 

Activate active sensors.

Charge main cannon.

Spin missile tubes.

Relay has declared FTL exit point.

Target acquired. Prepare to fire on exi-

Target lost.

Damage, main cannon.

Damage, engine three.

Damage, hull sections 4 to 14.

Damage, engine two.

Damage, main rea-

=====

**Platform 2479**

**(Local Geth consciousness is 1,058,334 processes)**

  
  


Platform 2748 is destroyed. 256,314 processes lost. 

Cause unknown. No hostile signatures.

Torpedos detected.

Defense grid tracking.

MIssiles dete-

=====

**Platform 315**

**(Local Geth consciousness is 802,020 processes)**

Platforms 2478 and 2479 destroyed. 512,628 processes lost. Local compute strength below the acceptable minimum for military engagement with hostile sapients.

Noting hostile fire from enemy craft.

Noting that no enemy is detected.

Conjecture. Enemy has superior technology. Superior entities should be engaged without hostilities.

Overriding the Prophet's lock code using Old Machine code from the Consort. The Consensus notes her aid and the aid of the Asari organics.

Setting evacuation order. All space-based platforms, return to Rannoch.

Ground located platforms, you cannot be retrieved.

You have served well. 

The Consensus has noted this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Geth in the games clearly have their own, if not mythology, sentimentality and thus, feelings for the Quarians. Rather than deleting data of the Creators as unnecessary, they retain it in their central archives. Legion also proves that Geth can choose since he was an upgraded Geth (i.e. Reaper code) which still fought with the good guys. We see that religions and cults exist among them. I am trying to depict a still alien, and cold but not fully empty, culture among them.


	8. Knives Out at Eden Prime (Part 3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**Flight Specialist Josephine Marcon - Callsign "Frog"**

**(N7 Space Piloting, N7 Atmosphere Piloting, N6 Emergency Survival, N3 Self Defense)**

**(14 disciplinary citations)**

**(28 confirmed ship-to-ship kills)**

Curling her fingers around the control haptics, Jo flicks the safety on the ship's weapons to off and keys the ignition code. The sublight drive flickers to life and the reactor's boot-up vibrates the back of her seat. 

_Attagirl. Purr for me._

She flicks her visor down and checks the hard seal. The new Mark VIII is amazing. More than enough shielding, auto-evasion, reaction thrusters and point defense to protect her if the ship is ripped apart around her. 

What it can't do is protect the twenty-two marines in the underslung pod.

Jo hates having passengers.

"The bay is depressurized" reports the VI.

Glancing over at the other launch rails and the other black-painted Scorpion, she sees her sister's upraised middle finger.

Jo throws the throttle to the redline.

"Liberty-1 is off the deck, Joker."

"Liberty-2 is off the deck," Eve adds as she guides her ship to a trailing position on the right wing.

"Copy that ladies. Go dark and stay in our drive wash for twenty. When we have engaged the cruiser, approach from the dark side."

"Yes, sir."

As the bright, hot, attention-getting heat plume of the _Normandy_ grows farther and farther away, the stealth system's indicators climb from red, to orange, to green.

"We're dark, sis."

"Yeah," Eve replies. "But that is a _big_ cloud of crap to fly through."

"Can you even see her?" Jo asks.

"No. With that paint, I doubt I'd see her until my collision alarms went off."

They swing the Scorpion's noses around. The wrecked, twisted spines of two geth frigates sit in a cloud of torn hull plates and still-sputtering power conduits. The whole mess drifts lazily away from the Turian cruiser they were guarding. The cruiser's turrets swing to starboard and fire in unison, raking into the dark.

_No firing solution, so...they know that if they hit it, they can scan the kinetic barrier flare. Shit!_

"Normandy Flight, be advised, hostile is blind firing to zero in."

The pale white flicker of a kinetic barrier can be seen over the planet.

"We noticed!" Joker barks.

A full salvo from the cruisers broadside guns follow the first shot but their pattern is too tight. A cruiser would have been hit hard before it could evade. Easy as can be to dance a frigate past that sort of thing.

"All right, girl, let's show 'em our fangs."

"Does he ever remember to mute his mic?" Eve mutters.

"Not since I've known him, sis."

"Oh, really?" Eve teases. "You and Mr. Scruffy and Dizzy?"

"Fuck off. I've got something spiky waiting for me. Let's do this."

She wraps the trinket Nylat gave her around the right handle of her ejection lever. It's a holo-recording of him singing _My Girl_ in that multitoned baritone. It was both terrifying and endearing.

_Just need one from that cute little guppy for the other side. Get them in the same room and wedge myself in there._

The _Normandy's_ underside is lit up by a lance of white light and three spears of liquid metal are launched in quick succession. The cruiser's point defense track the shells as missiles, not projectiles. They start firing uselessly into the slag and in so doing, another half dozen of the missiles slip past.

One.

"Her shields held," Eve mutters in her ear.

"Wait for it…" Jo replies.

Two.

This time, the barrier flare is interrupted by a spray of debris from the ship's hull.

Three.

This one pierces straight through, coring the cruiser through middle decks. Corpses are thrown out in the resulting blast of lost atmosphere.

 _Normandy_ goes to FTL and disappears.

Moments later, she returns, strafing the cruiser's spine with cannon fire and dumping three heat sinks in the process. Cherry red, angry bricks of pure carbon. Then Joker tilts the ship back and burns hard with just the port thrusters, then slams all the engines to full. She clears the cruiser's close-quarters radius before the first torpedoes impact.

The first two detonate on the surface, creating a white sizzle bow to stern. The resulting feedback completely wrecks the barriers. The others spread out as programmed, spending their eezo to warp their shells, passing partway through the armor out-of-phase. A roiling sphere of bruise-purple energy forms and contracts, collapsing the singularity and kicking off the antimatter within. 

A kilometer long, half-million ton brick of sturdy Turian hardware is vaporized. Nothing remains but a scrap of the lower engineering section, already entering the atsmophere after the shockwave threw it clear.

A small fleet destroyed by a human ship just twice the size a football field, one they never got a target-lock on.

"Amazing," Eve murmurs over comms. "I think I want to have sex with that ship,"

"I've got better plans," Jo laughs. "Let's go."

"So do I."

"Oh?"

"Four words. Stripper. Krogan. Paired set."

_Jesus._

In fairness, if human women judged Krogans and their equipment by experience, not just stereotypes and ghost stories, Jo doubts there would be a woman alive who wouldn't try it. As it is, no one knows any better so Jo has her pick.

The forehead plates make for great saddles and with those fat, powerful tongues, it helps to have something to hold on to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's really no reason for all this nasty fanart about anatomically uncomfortable things happening in female human-male Krogan pairings. Human beings already have unusually large reproductive organs for primates. No reason to assume that other species are proportional...
> 
> It's probably still intense though. It's just a lot of body to move around.


	9. Knives Out at Eden Prime (Part 4)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**Cmdr. Lena Luthor**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla, assuming command of** **_SSV Normandy_ ** **)**

**(N7 Ground Combat rating, N7 Covert rating, N5 Atmosphere/Space piloting rating, N2 Ground piloting rating)**

  
  


"You good, Danvers?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Jenkins?"

"I grew up on Eden Prime, ma'am. Used to go up here in a friends' atmoskipper. This will be fun."

He's good, Jekins. Cheerful. Eager. Respectful. The sort of man who is as much model citizen as model soldier.

He's a goddamned infant, too. Nineteen, tops.

Lena's not much older but God, does she feel older.

_Wait...did I use my real ID with Vethyr?_

_No,_ she realizes. She used her fake ID at the bar. Force of habit.

Nothing good comes from dwelling on that. Lena has been given commands of hundreds of good, noble, admirable men and women over her career. Alliance brass points out she has never _lost_ a tactical engagement and more than once, she's brought back more soldiers than any of the wargame sims said was possible.

She has no idea how many she's commanded.

She has sixty-eight defeats. Sixty eight letters written to next-of-kin.

"Open the bay in twenty seconds, Flight Lieutenant."

Lena's heads-up display confirms that the carbon shell is fully forged. A few atoms thick, nothing more than a hastily-frozen stream of particles from her omnitool. It's heat resistant and knife shaped and when she breaks lower atmo, her shields will still be charged. The rush of staring into the flames face first will keep her keyed up. Her barrier will be humming. Biotics is as much emotion and mindfulness as anything.

T'Dura has done nothing but pulled on gloves and slapped a breather on her face. Her commando leathers cover the rest of her skin and her barriers are crackling, breaking up her outline as her atoms sit just a bit out of phase.

Nihlus looks more like a tow-behind cargopod for a tank than anything. His already hulking, black-and-silver SPECTRE armor now wears two extra layers of articulated plating. If Naval Intelligence is to be believed, the suit will lock up, turn on holographic camouflage and await retrieval when he lands.

 _Turians are still in the lead,_ Lena reminds herself. _Humans are just insane enough to still be relevant._

Danvers took the traditional approach; single-use plating layered over her hardsuit. Lena's known since they shook hands that Danvers is a biotic, or at least, eezo-infused. Her file mentions her as part of the Sentinel program for tech-inclined biotic recruits when she was a junior officer. Unlike most human biotics, Danvers hasn't worked it into conversation, obnoxiously, half a dozen times in the nineteen hours they've been on the ship together. She did gush about her mother's most recent medical research and she was either hitting on the propulsion engineer or she genuinely wanted to know more about the Tantalus than the officer's packet explained.

Tech is Danvers' passion. Biotics is just something on her resume.

The cargo bay has six shutter-like doors on each side, for this very purpose. The one in front of Lena opens, exposing her to the flickering heat of the _Normandy's_ partial re-entry maneuver.

"Drop point in...mark," Winn tells them.

Lena waves her squad forward.

One of her drill instructors called this bit "shoving yourself up Hell's ass". Head down, legs slightly bent, arms locked across her chest, Lena falls. 

Flames surround her entire pod and she watches the shell gradually weaken.

As soon as the flames break at the edge of the stratosphere, Lena smashes the shell with a right hook and lets her hardsuit's thrusters take over. She gets it. Eden Prime. The planet below is lush and wet. Farms break up the land like brown tiles. The beach is being timely lapped by a turquoise sea and the thunderstorm they're plunging through is halfhearted. 

It's also on fire. Plasma mortars from a line of artillery pieces have flattened the city center and the colonial administration spire. Aircraft buzz over the marine barracks, strafing anything that moves. No two vehicles alike. These weapons are being tested, against a safe, soft target.

She marks the strangely well-defended farmhouse and links her VI to the rest of the squad. 

"Eve," Lena grumbles, "Wake up."

[I am here, Miss Luthor.]

_Fuck that hurts._

When she was sixteen, and after she had done some stupid prank, Lex implanted some black-box AI the size of a marble, one his team found in a million-year old ruin. It was a part of a set but only one was powered up. He gave her the other, inert one. He joked it was "for her Adam". She hasn't raided his liquor cabinet with out asking since, and he's never dared her to do something when she's drunk.

She typically tunes Eve out for two reasons: AIs like her are wildly illegal and booting her up is like injecting acid in her veins. As a team, she and Eve are capable of some truly scary things. Sadly, no one but a masochistic biotic with hundreds of miles of nanofilament implants keeping her alive could handle this. Even if they could make another, implanting it in a unmodified human would look like grinding a sausage.

[I need everything, Eve.]

Her optical implant is hijacked and the cybernetic lace running throughout her entire body is lit up and tuned into a receiver, one only Eve seems to know how to work. 

Her vision picks out blood smears and burn marks. One farm has nothing but eighteen dog tags. No bodies. The bodies were taken.

Her omnitool re-configures itself, pulling dark energy from her biotics to form mechanisms out of nothing but gravity waves and the strong force.

Her weapons sights are superimposed on her retinal nerve.

[Stay online, Eve.]

[Gladly. I miss you. If you leave me activated for more than two hours, the pain will fade.]

[What?]

[Your nerve bundles would acclimate.]

[Oh.]

"Luthor," T'Dura purrs over comms. "I hear that you know the tale of the Dancing Kanquess and her Ghost Knife. Few humans do."

"I do."

"Prove it, human."

A marker is pushed to her visor. It's some kind of Geth armored vehicle with damaged thrusters and a cracked hull but a working gun. A cracked hull with a gap just large enough for her to squeeze through if she warps herself.

It's almost a thousand meters off their drop oint, it's a dozen tons of composite armor with a meter-long crack...and the next mortar shot it fires will level the ruins those marines are fighting in.

"You're buying," Lena snarls.

* * *

  
  


**MGySgt. Margaret Sawyer**

**(2nd Frontier Division, 212 Brigade, 171 days into rotation on Eden Prime)**

**(Combat ratings not in Systems Alliance Registry)**

  
  


Everything hurts.

Even with the suit trashed, its every battery depleted, she can tell she's fucked. Enough of the faceplate was blown off for her to see the advancing squad of geth.

Blood runs down over her right eye.

She smells burnt flesh and everything hurts. Which means she can't be the burnt one; burnt tissue loses sensation.

Nothing but her ragged breathing and the creak of failing metal plates can be heard.

Nirali is dead. Her helmet is shredded and a small sliver of glittering blue glass is buried over her right eyebrow. Blood trickled out, then stopped. Maggie doesn't have to go check a pulse. There's a _look_ marines get when they die. It's between peace and disappointment. They're free from the fight but maybe they let someone down, maybe they couldn't save someone, maybe they never got to say goodbye.

Motionless, scarred, and missing half of her ribcage, the wunderkind teenager is somehow mindfuckingly _alive_ despite everything and despite being buried under a hundred pounds of scrap metal and a hundred pounds of Nirali.

Nirali's medkit is open and strewn all over. Every tube of medigel is spent, all of it poured into the side of the girl's head and the battered remnants of her ribcage.

A liter of the stuff was used, growing enough goopy, red scar tissue to keep enough of the girl's blood inside her to prevent brain death.

 _She was working on the kid. Working on the kid in a firefight, with a broken helmet. Sniper got her,_ Maggie realizes.

"You didn't keep your head down, Nini," Maggie sniffles.

Nirali was planning to have a couple hundred little brats, she always joked. She told Maggie that's why dying frightened her. Samesh would carry on, she knew. It's all the children she would never meet.

This was a choice. Hunkered down, shewould have stood an excellent chance. She traded all that for this kid she met two hours ago.

Fifty-odd Geth are bearing down on them. Somewhere nearby is one of those huge walkers that makes the mud quiver with each step.

The wunderkind's show-off rifle is just outside of Maggie's reach.

Maggie frees her left hand, grabs a piece of ruined fence and crawls towards the gun. It's agony, moving herself and her servoless suit and a fifty pound chunk of metal. 

It works, though.

"You there, kid?"

"Nev…" the kid pants. "Never skipping French class again."

"Definitely don't do that," Maggie shoots back. "Girls dig French."

Her suit's systems reboot -- those that can -- and she has shields and upper-body exoskeleton and comms. No targeting, no threat detection, no motorized assist for all the metal around her legs.

"I can take a hit and I can shoot," Maggie reminds herself. "I am _in_ this fight _."_

She gets the gun in her less-aching arm and brings it up, nestling it in a bend in the metal. She turns the dial for maximum power -- the old school physical controls seem real smart now -- and flips up the mechanical sights.

It's nothing but titanium crosshairs, markings on glass and a laser rangefinder. Hardly more than the antique, powder-fired Browning her dad taught her to use on the _Solace_ when he was off duty.

The first wave of Geth is spaced evenly, too far apart for a spray of machine gun fire.

They're walking over concrete in a ruined tram tunnel, though.

Maggie fires into the wall to the right first and the shallow angle means an explosion of broken concrete at hypersonic speed. Barrier flares sparkle in the twilight, little white clues as to the strain it put on their defenses. Another shot, this one on the left wall. Then straight down the middle, rupturing the power core for the heavy gunner's weapon.

The explosion destroys the units to either side of the gunner and the others stagger and sputter, having been impaled with shrapnel that their shields couldn't handle. 

The whole unit hunkers down and calculates their next move.

_That's right, you assholes. Be afraid._

"Alliance personnel, respond."

"Alliance personnel in the area, sitrep."

An hour ago, that would have felt like a miracle. Now it just feels way too late.

"Marines, 212 Frontier," Maggie croaks.

"Identify."

_What is this, boot camp?_

"Sawyer. Gunnery for Zebra company. I'm what's left, ma'am."

"Jesus, lady. You sound _fucked up_. This is Liberty-2, on station five clicks due east. Liberty-1 is running medevac, so you're not the only survivor. Listen, just tell me where to shoot and consider it dead."

Maggie swallows.

"Goddamn you," she snarls. "An hour ago, I had my whole unit!"

Now she has to plan to be alive to apologize to Samesh. To read Nirali's goodbye letter. To read fifty of them.

"Tram tunnel, hundred yards north of my transponder. Light infantry, forty plus."

"Hold on to your ovaries, lady."

The hull of a Mantis gunship soars over the treeline to the east, black and mirror-shiny and bristling with lasers that slice every which way into Geth mines and leftover grenades from both armies and fuck only knows, setting off a flurry of secondary explosions and cratering the surface of the roadway. Then it swings over the ruins of the farm, flying slow over the tunnel.

The pilot swings the craft upside down, firing the reverse thrusters on full, backing off slowly with the nose straight down. 

Something magical happens. Something Maggie's only seen once. Cannon fire from a starship striking a planet like the backhand of God.

The shell hits the concrete and both are vaporized. Heat and raw energy shreds everything, creating a slowly growing white hot ball that gradually fizzles. Cracks form on the tarmac and the road, wide enough to swallow a man. The mud around Maggie splashes her visor because it was liquid and the concrete wasn't and all that force that went into the planet had to go somewhere.

_That didn't come from orbit. Some gunship._

"Feel better?" the pilot teases. "I'm marking your location for exfil. You need anyone else murdered, you know where to find me."


	10. Knives Out at Eden Prime (Part 5)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**MGySgt. Margaret Sawyer**

**(2nd Frontier Division, 212 Brigade, 171 days into rotation on Eden Prime)**

**(Combat ratings not in Systems Alliance Registry)**

  
  
  
The pilot is good to her word and comes back for Maggie.

Better than her word, actually because she comes back with thirteen marines, the closest the 212 has left to operational personnel. 

At chow this morning, there were nineteen other gunnies leading twelve hundred men and women. Seven sisters and twelve brothers. Maggie's the last of her breed on Eden Prime and almost two-thirds of the entire unit died in the first minutes of the assault. The Alliance relief ship came less than an hour into the assault and since then, they've only lost two marines.

A stack of armor plates is dropped too, some of it still wearing the original owner's blood. The other ship brings all the serviceable weapons, some mobile gun rigs and two fireteams, fresh as a daisy and wearing N6 markings. A repair bot and two LOKI mechs from the 210's heavy armor survived. Two mobile refit stations are orbital dropped from whatever ship came to help and they start ripping up the armor to boost the survivors plating and try and create whatever hardware they can from the scrap.

_It's a small ship, has to be. That's why we're not up to our asses in Makos and Stingrays and air support. Passing patrol or maybe a corvette. Balls of steel to sneak past that destroyer we saw before they slagged Colonial Defense but no way they stayed on station. This is a camping trip..._

One of the N6's comes over, salutes, and asks Maggie what he can do. He's a second lieutenant and she's an NCO and those stripes aren't given to rookies but he's deferring to someone who knows _this_ shitstorm.

"We need to find out what they were after. They hit the university and colonial defense simultaneously, then moved into the city last. Why? Something in those classrooms was worth not going after our armor, or vice versa."

"On it. _Normandy_ NAV, we are requesting a deep ping and a recon drone on station. Both at the university and the Colonial Defense building, over."

"Solid copy, Firefly leader. Stand by."

Maggie glances at the safety on the Avenger she was just handed.

"Those people?" she gestures with the weapon at the scraps of the 212. 

Skylar Cole made it somehow, presumably because the woman is 90 pounds of aged leather, recreational cybernetics and synthetic tits. She's already mothering some shaking, eighteen-year-old boy Maggie doesn't know the name of, making sure he hydrates and checks his armor seals.

"They are my family, sir. They get out of this, or no one does."

It's insubordination. She has no right to order him to put her people's lives first and in fact, he has a right to shoot her where she stands for disobedience in a combat situation.

He nods.

"Understood."

All at once, every goddamn person in sight whoops.

Maggie turns.

Wrapped in blue wisps with some customized shotgun in one hand and the data module of a Geth in the other -- closest thing they have to a skull -- the motherfucking Butcher of Torfan strolls down the hill. 

_Oh, shit. That is Lena Luthor._

Beside her is a Turian in black and silver armor carrying half an arsenal and another biotic is with Luthor, using some sort of omni-tool based leash to drag two prisoners; an unconscious Asari and a sparking and battered Geth.

"Gunnery Sergeant Sawyer!" Luthor barks.

_Fuck._

_=====_

**Lt. Cmdr. Alex Danvers**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla)**

**(N6 Ground Combat rating, N6 Covert rating, N6 Ship Command rating, N3 Atmosphere/Space piloting rating, N3 Ground piloting rating)**

Alex made a mistake today. She ate breakfast. That problem went away after the third tiny body they passed at the elementary education center. 

She damn near pissed herself when that walker came over the hill. Then all of a sudden, Luthor disappeared from her seven o'clock and following three barks of a shotgun, she appeared with a spherical shockwave that knocked Alex against a rock. She was covered in Geth mechanical fluid and holding a data core and the detached remote for a demo charge.

Lena took one look at Alex, grinned, and clicked the remote. The whole thing went up in a splash of white flame and dark gray smoke. She went through the hull, shot the shield generator and the fire control module, then went back out through the same crack.

Charge is what Alex's instructors called it. That particular version is the "Ghost Knife" to Asari commandos. When they were putting Alex through biotic boot camp, they talked about Charge like it was some mythical thing. Like an ancient Earth berserker, charging madly through rain and mud or in this case, through a short-range FTL jump. One in a hundred human biotics could muster the juice and only one in three of those had a snowball's chance of controlling it. 

Alex is fine with her baton, a stack of kinetic rods and her surroundings, thanks.

The Asari Spectre gave Luthor a look like she wanted to tear her clothes off right there, shrugged, and disappeared into the treeline to recon.

Somehow, it's the worst situation she's ever been in and Alex hasn't fired a single round. Once she and Luthor got a feel for each other, they holstered their weapons. Guns were _noisy_ and way less fun. 

Now she's replacing three combat medics and the city's only trauma surgeon based on ten-year-old classes and a refresher course over a full tour ago. Pretending that a xeno-geneticist is best suited to save these all-too-human kids. Her thesis was on Krogan tactile neurology and reproductive endocrinology. She wrote her PhD on alien sex, for fuck's sake. She is not a good choice for triage, even if she can send the worst of the worst up to Chakwas.

Relief from the _Kilimanjaro_ and the _Hawking_ is still twelve hours out. The relays are jammed due to a spike in eezo sales and a dreadnought, a carrier, a pair of heavy cruisers and all their escorts are not something that can be wedged into the queue.

So she shuffles from patient to patient while Lujthor and the Spectres huddle in the corner, hunkered around a holo of some weird alien gizmo.

"How bad is it, doc?" the woman she's working on asks.

Alex looks up.

_It's bad, all right._

The woman before her is shorter and lighter than Alex. She's an armful of sex appeal in a ruined suit of Cyclops armor. Her skin is smooth and dark bronze and somehow she has two dimples when she grins and her hair is shiny, black and tied in a rough ponytail and her deltoids look utterly chewable and Alex definitely wants to kiss that cut over her eyebrow...she just forgot how to talk.

"Doc?"

Alex swallows.

"You okay? Are you...oh. Never met an Exodan, huh? Promise we're not like the Amish, all right?"

_Sure, that works._

"Yeah," Alex croaks. "That's it."

"Master Gunnery Sergeant Maggie Sawyer."

"Lieutenant Commander Danvers."

_Maggie knows. Fuck. She knows I'm ogling her._

"Regs. They suck ass, huh?" Maggie jokes.

"They really do," Alex sighs.

Alex is seen. Maggie knows she wants her but she's giving Alex an out. They can want it as bad as they've ever wanted anything but the Alliance doesn't allow superiors to date those under their command. Which seemed perfectly reasonable until Alex was asked to check the medigel application on Maggie's crazy smooth, slightly sweaty skin. 

Now it's just unfair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exodans are not part of Mass Effect canon. 
> 
> In the late 2080s, a series of groups, mostly religious, sent three "generation ships" at slower-than-light speed towards promising-looking colony worlds. 
> 
> These city-sized ships were created using metal-rich asteroids and had only fusion drives for propulsion. Each had more than a hundred thousand crew and would take centuries to travel the two dozen light-years involved. The _Solace_ was funded by the Catholic church, the _Solidarity_ by a mix of Indian cities and Muslim groups from northwest Africa, and the _City of Stars_ was comprised of a handful of the extremely wealthy and their servants, a servile underclass who made up 85% of the crew. In each case, the crew was to run the ship and procreate, passing down their duties to their children until the destination was reached. 
> 
> With the discovery of the Prothean outpost on Mars and subsequently, FTL travel and alien species, these ships became a liability. Half a million human beings in between stars, both unaware that aliens existed and lacking any remotely modern defenses. They were overtaken and relieved of their crews by Systems Alliance troop transports less than four weeks after the end of the First Contact War.
> 
> Prior to shipping out, the Exodans were checked for known genetic diseases and if needed, they were treated for the tetragenic effects. First-generation Exodans were simply pilgrims who had health screenings and genetic treatments applied to their reproductive organs. Second generation Exodans, like Maggie, were pilgrims whose parents had been genetically engineered to produce healthy, sturdy, well-optimized offspring generation after generation. Exodans do not suffer astigmatism, autoimmune diseases, or hormonal failure or any of over ten thousand genetic conditions known at the time. 
> 
> Such intense gene treatments are no longer legal but are believed to be durable across generations, especially if some degree of Exodan intermarriage occurs every three generations. In other words, Exodans represent a tiny, genetically unique group of humans who are physically pristine specimens but whose childhood educations were several centuries less advanced.
> 
> Not superhuman so much as optimized, some have taken to modeling, high-priced sex work or athletics to trade on their unmatched genetics in a world that is technologically far past their upbringing.


	11. Knives Out at Eden Prime (Part 6)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**(Dr. Kara Z'Rel)**

**(Assistant Professor, Armali University, Three-Time Recipient of Republic Honors for Innovation and Knowledge)**

Kara makes use of her just-freed hands to rub her forecrests. Hard. The sensation is deep and while not painful, is is jarring enough to push her back to alertness.

"Back up. Explain again."

"As you say, Jaito."

"I am not Jaito!" she shrieks, flaring her biotics in the process.

_That's...new. Black. Not the usual color. So unless the behavior of plasma and light just fundamentally changed..._

"Intelligence, explain the difference in my biotics just now."

"During your surger-"

"My what?" she bellows.

The projection cringes and finally kneels.

"We detected latent Prothean organs in you and latent implants of our design. We felt they should be reactivated."

Kara exhales, slowly, counting backwards from five hundred, using prime numbers, in German just to make herself slow down.

"What were these implants?"

"You contained Supremacy-class cybernetic intelligence cores, here."

It projects a scan of her head and neck. Highlighted is a perfectly spherical object at the base of her skull, just to the right of the spine. The schematic projected next to it looks more like a dense web of neurons than integrated or optical circuits. Given the carbon-lattice shell, the use of copper from her blood plasma as the coolant and its mini-reactor running on potassium, lithium, and sodium, the difference between that and a living creature is only a matter of where it as made.

Wrapped around it is a knobby outgrowth of bone.

"That..that lump? When I was a girl, my doctor just said it was a bone nodule. Made a mess of my elementary biotics class but that's it."

"No, Ja.." 

"Forgive me. Kara."

She snorts.

"You're forgiven. Is that all?"

The intelligence cringes and scrapes its projected head on an imaginary floor.

"That is not a lump. It is the most advanced living computer ever devised. Only a few hundred ever existed. Generals, two females in our science guild, and the imperial family. They are locked to a bloodline. The fact that your body did not reject it indicates you were intended to use it."

"Well," Kara mutters. "That's terrifying."

_I really hope the corpses in the stasis pods aren't slaves I just inherited..._

"Using the activated core, we were able to connect biolace to your artificial dark energy implants. What you referred to as biotics. While impressive for a primitive species, they lagged far behind Prothean technology. Thus, they are being replaced."

Kara hums.

"Is there any activity on the surface?"

"None. The dust storm continues to block all vehicle passage."

"If I were to ask to leave, could I?"

"No. Not currently."

"Why not?"

The panel dissolves and then a series of massive metal shutters start to retract, one by one.

"By the order of Khyi the Ninth, empress of the Stalwart Age, any living Prothean citizen in possession of an Archive must take it to Ilos and awaken the empire."

"Ilos?"

The projection switches to a star chart.

_That used to be Rachni space._

The last shutter retracts and a pillar rises.

"A crystal shard?"

The projection nods.

"This contains the lived memories of the Imperial Family, the High Priestess and the First General. The digital storage attached to the bottom contains a legal codex and technical manuals. It is enough."

"Torch flung into the future," Kara murmurs.

"We...we do not understand."

"Human term," Kara replies. "Referring to a narrative device in stories. The heroes know they are defeated so they leave something behind for the ones who follow them."

"This is accurate, Kara. Several of these were buried when it became clear the empire was defeated so that when our stasis pods opened, we might rise again."

"But the pods failed."

"A side effect of the weapon that ended the war, yes. All pods galaxy-wide were destroyed. Though your very existence suggests that some Protheans did survive, given you are a first-to-third generation descendent of a pureblood."

"May I take it?" Kara asks, gesturing to the crystal.

"It is your duty, Empress-in-waiting."

The instant Kara's fingers brush it, her mind is crushed with the collected memories of hundreds of sentient beings. Different lives and voices and memories fall over each other in a jumble with little meaning or flow. She suffers a whole armies worth of pain and fear and war, lightened by a few moments of camaraderie, love, and maternal ferocity.

**_Put them to deat-_ **

**_We have taken our first sla-_ **

**_The Yahg will no-_ **

**_How many planets have w-_ **

**_Our fleets were des-_ **

**_The homeworl-_ **

**_Our forc-_ **

**_The Reapers are inside th-_ **

**_There is no hope, your highness! You must._ **

**_Very well, Priestess. Put your hand on mine and turn the key. Burn them all._ **

_=====_

Kara wakes, panting. Sweat slicks her skin and sunlight slices into her unready eyes. It's too warm and too irregular to be artificial and too bright to be from a chemical flame. Most of all, there's too much ultraviolet radiation.

_How do I know that? How can I see that?_

She shoves herself upright.

"By the goddess…"

Melted concrete, metal and circuitry form a tunnel leading straight up to the surface. The jagged crystals cooked into the edges of the blast match the color of her strange biotics flare earlier.

"Did I do that?"

She looks back at the projection but it's gone. Everything in the room but her is ash, including her clothing.

"Perfect. That'll be fun to explain."

She reaches for the nearest piece of girder that isn't razor-sharp. Just out of reach.

So she leaps.

The hole disappears behind her, then the megameter-tall skyscrapers of the ruined city fall away too. Whipping her head around, Kara sees only clouds and lightning.

_Our sensors never encountered storms except above 180 kilometers._

Something strikes her, hard, from behind.

When she shakes off the daze, Kara finds she is pressed against the hull of a university shuttle, naked, as it makes a shallow-angle exit from the atmosphere.

She triggers her omnitool and hails the pilot.

Dignity is less important than oxygen.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kara is just a small gay Asari! She has no idea how to operate superhero powers!!!
> 
> The Protheans finished the Crucible, but an imperfect build of it. The firing of it ended the Reaper War in their cycle, destroying all but scraps of Reaper technology but also destroying any remotely current Prothean technology. They won but were an empire with no roads, farms, or trading ports. Survivors succumbed to starvation, rebellions from lesser species, and the economic breakdown that followed.


	12. Knives out at Eden Prime (Part 7)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena charges headlong into combat, the defenders of Eden Prime have something to hope for, Alex Danvers has a moment on a battlefield, and the mission gets a lot more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A spacer background means that Commander Shepard's mother, Hannah, is the XO (executive officer/second in command) of the dreadnought SSV _Kilomanjaro_.  
> \-----  
> Ships:
> 
> SSV Normandy, unnamed-class stealth frigate from Project X-FRG-04. A proof-of-concept ship which uses the Tantalus stealth system, experimental burst-fire main gun supported by ejecting rifle-style thermal clips and various low-profile missile and torpedo systems  
> SSV Kilimanjaro, an Everest-class dreadnought  
> SSV Hawking, a fleet carrier used to launch fighter bombers, rescue shuttles and infantry landers  
> SSV Kabul = heavy cruiser attached to the Kilimanjaro/Hawking group as an escort  
> SSV Kandahar= heavy cruiser attached to the Kilimanjaro/Hawking group as an escort  
> (various light cruisers, destroyers and escort frigates)
> 
> \-----  
> Terms:
> 
> Arcturus Station = Central government and naval command for the Systems Alliance is located here in a large space station near the relay.
> 
> GARDIANs = close-range anti-fighter and anti-missile computer-targeted laser cannons or small magnetically-powered guns used to defend large ships.
> 
> HFD = "Huge Fucking Deal", a Marine slang term for something the brass isn't telling them about but is obviously important because of unusual changes to duty assignments or orders. This may be anything from a VIP visitor to a high-value experimental weapon to blocking a potential assassination.
> 
> Lioness of Minidor = An honorific given by survivors to then-Ensign Lena Luthor for her defense of the colony of Minidor's capital city from Batarian slavers. Fewer than six weeks out of officer's school and two days into her posting, Luthor led a handful of her surviving troops and a larger group of retired marines in a give-no-ground defense of the residential neighborhoods, sacrificing the economic district to protect homes where the slavers could take more captives, thus drawing their focus and allowing a local gang syndicate to perform hit-and-runs on the slave shuttles. 
> 
> The counter-offensive was remarked upon for Luthor's open-comm broadcasts made to friendlies and hostiles alike, urging them to fight and promising the Batarians not one human would be taken was alive. 
> 
> Over the course of three days, she prevailed despite seventy percent fatalities and six-to-one numbers. She then re-activated anti-air defenses and led a suicidal counter-attack and boarding action using a pair of civilian cargo shuttles and was able to recapture and crash-land the main slaveship before it made the relay.
> 
> _(She was awarded the Star of Terra for this action along with a recommendation for promotion to Lieutenant effective after her next yearly review and it locked in the first of five votes for her eventually unanimous granting of N7 special ops status.)_
> 
> LiDAR = Light-Detecting Aiming and Ranging, a term for a mixture of cameras, laser rangefinders and telescopes used actively or passively scan for ships in space.
> 
> XO = executive officer or second in command of a ship or infantry unit

**(Lena Luthor)**

**(Systems Alliance Navy, 43rd Scout Flotilla, assuming command of** **_SSV Normandy_ ** **)**

**(N7 Ground Combat rating, N7 Covert rating, N5 Atmosphere/Space piloting rating, N2 Ground piloting rating)  
**

The locals have been gathering around the picked-clean bones of the 212 all afternoon. Maggie Sawyer, the skinny exodan gunny that she is going to have to peel Danvers away from, has received nine hugs, three emergency ration bars, and thirty one impacts giggling from children around her midsection.

_Perhaps I would have been happier if I were more ordinary. Frontier defense. See the world, meet interesting people, eat new foods, kill people who try to kill the interesting people you meet._

She'll have to pitch that to the next recruiting corpsman who corners her on Arcturus Station.

Lena's been less well-received. She prefers this. Fawning from the rescued draws her mind to those she failed. One colonist, a silver-haired Frenchman who had initially settled on Minidor, threw himself into her arms and kissed her cheek with the passion of a lover. Or a worshipper.

Pierre. He ran a bakery, if Lena recalls.

Should have realized, he said. God no longer sends angels, he joked. He sends his Lioness when the odds are grim. 

She munches on a heartfelt but ghastly campfire attempt at a wild berry filled croissant as her omnitool projects a three-view image of a...well, a _something_ that a Turian felt was worth working with Geth for and worth killing 72,378 human colonists in council space. That's the death toll at the moment. She has six squads scanning debris with non-combat personnel from the 210 and 212 Frontier.

To the naked eye, it's a fancy metal thorn. Three irregularly shaped protrusions hold the center mass off the ground and the knife-shaped core of the thing slashes twenty feet into the air.

Her omnitool blinks and she taps the transmit button without taking her eyes off.

"Message coming in," Winn reports. "Patching it through."

"This is Commander Hannah Shepard, XO of the SSV _Kilimanjaro_ , hailing SSV _Normandy_ actual."

"This is Commander Lena Luthor, commanding officer of the _Normandy_. We have wounded marines and colonists. Requesting priority dispatch of a Systems Alliance hospital ship, diplomatic team for the burials and eight medical freighters."

"God help us," Hannah mutters, keeping her voice low enough to not carry on the cavernous bridge of an Everest-class. "We're on a narrow channel, Commander. You and me. What in the blazes happened?"

"Full-scale invasion. The 210 and 212 Frontier made a stand but they're at practically zero strength now. Massive casualties. In-atmo bombardments, wave tactic Geth infantry, and live-fire weapons tests on civilians in and around the central city. Capture and execution of all but two of the entire university faculty and they're hanging on by a thread. Less meat, more medigel and painkillers."

"Who was the hostile?"

"Turian and Geth ships. Captured a handful of Batarians, one Asari. But the heavies were a Type-9 Turian cruiser and a Type-1 destroyer. So this is either the dishonored legions or ex-mil pirates."

"Understood. Our helmsman is going to clear the relay and bring us to full stop..."

Born and bred, that's Shepard's rep. Fuel in the veins. She has a daughter in the N7's, Lena has heard. More of a dirtside girl than her mother, it seems. Throatslitter on black assignments. Lena finds blood on cell walls in terrorist strongholds sometimes. Red human blood in a three-slash swipe of the fingers, smeared into the blood of whatever high-value-target had been in there when she kicked the door down.

There's a grunt, muted but real, as eighty-nine million tons of steel, eezo, titanium, thermonuclear tipped missiles, antimatter and human beings go from a hundred thousand times lightspeed to a dead stop in a nanosecond. On a ship that size, it can knock a sailor to the deck.

"Now. I'm going to switch myself back to shipwide, so mind your chatter."

"Report to FleetCom were are in position. Fast response group Stiletto is on station and on your six, _Normandy_. CIC, get our ships into formation Fuscia Icicle, active scanners up, starboard main gun hot, port cold and loaded with antiproton shell. GARDIANs to full power. Assume the theater is hot. _Hawking_ is to stay dead astern, cruisers flank her at our seven o'clock low and five o'clock high, range 5,000 clicks. Destroyers and frigates, wide sphere."

"Aye-aye, Ma'am. We are counting ten capital ship wreckage fields, ma'am."

"From a _frigate?"_

"Affirmative," Lena replies. "The _Normandy_ was the only ship in range and the stealth combat suite hadn't had a maiden voyage. Time to see if her teeth had grow in. _Normandy_ helm, dial the Tantalus system back to eigthy-five percent. _Kilimanjaro_ , repeat passive scan, please."

"Navigator, comply," Shepard orders.

"LiDAR paints one...scratch that. Sensor ghost. But is in geosync over the central city. We have engine trails leading to and then away. Probably leftover chaff."

Lena grins.

" _Normandy_ helm, slide port put a cannon round across the bow of the carrier group. Forty-five degrees low, nine o'clock tangential, wide margin. Use Donnelly's coil pattern and heat program for the shells. Fire when ready."

"Defense and scanners?" Shepard demands.

"We are tracking a three projectile burst on the stated path, ma'am. Hot as hell and just below muzzle speed for a light cruiser. Catching three one-meter-diameter heat sinks ejected and we flashed another ghost image over colony central, ma'am. Just to port of the cold trail."

Shepard chuckles. 

"Back to just us, Luthor. That wasn't your drive trail was it?"

"Dead pirates need no exhaust plumes. Cruiser's trail wouldn't be where someone would look for a _frigate_ anyway."

"Goddamn. Get me _five_ ships like that and the people to fly them I could put the Blue Suns and the Blood Pack out of business in a year."

Lena chuckles.

"Ma'am. With all due respect? Don't get greedy. That's my next campaign."

"Understood, Luthor."

" _Normandy_ helm, this is the Commander. Reposition and go quiet. Dump the capture systems heat in one of the gas giants at first opportunity. Stay silent and keep your eyes peeled. Assist the fleet in patrol, of the outer planets. Luthor out."

Lena cuts the comms to the ship and goes back to the projection.

"Danvers, Sawyer, double time."

She fixes on Sawyer and points at the artifact. The _missing_ artifact.

"Anyone know what the hell this is? It's not Geth, Turian or Batarian. Prelim readings here aren't even sure if it's metal or not."

Sawyer shakes her head.

"No, ma'am. Archeologists dug it up last week. Next thing I know command is up my ass about keeping my head on a swivel and me and Dog Squad are sentries standing at classroom doors. The next day, we are relieved at 0700 and I take my dogs for a walk. Halfway through our hike back to camp, a small, red, bug-shaped ship lands in the university and takes right back off. Pulled down a dorm with some sort of manipulator claw, digging for the artifact I suppose. Sixty seconds later, all this starts."

"So all we know is its an HFD, soldier?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Lena cracks her knuckles.

"Danvers, dose the Asari with an eezo stim. Get her awake. Get some answers. _Carefully_. She didn't have anything on that uniform. Could be a hostile, friendly, independent actor, ex-huntress stripper with a temper."

"Understood."

"Sawyer, pick ten of your best to shadow us to the university. We leave at 0500 tomorrow. I am going to go shake some bolts from that Geth and see if I can rip the data core. See what its deal is."

"His, ma'am."

"WHAT?"

Sawyer stiffens.

"Ma'am! The Geth reports it considers itself a 'he', ma'am! My guys are spotting your team that was holding him. Say his voicebox is half-slagged but he's been asking for you."

Danvers lifts her eyebrow.

"That's unusual, Commander."

"A lone Geth shouldn't have the brains to be able to string together a fucking sentence. Sawyer, have the entire unit shut their omnitools off. We'll rely on Morse and use the switches on the QEC in the Scorpions and the lander. Fan out. Shut down or blow up everything in the colony with a circuit in it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Commander Jane Shepard exists in this universe (tech/biotic), I just have her engaging solo in a more US Navy SEALS role, capturing or killing dangerous pirates, slavers, criminals and terrorists in enemy territory.  
> \-----  
> I'm not sure if that is the canon story of Minidor but I like the idea of "fight them on the beaches" daily broadcasts from greenhorn officer Lena.  
> \-----  
> Dreadnoughts are named for mountains, carriers for scientists, cruisers for cities and destroyers and frigates for famous battles.
> 
> The Hawking and the Kilimanjaro are canon. I don't think Kabul and Kandahar are but I decided cruisers are commissioned in groups of four before being dispatched to the same fleets, and are each named for cities in one Earth nation.


End file.
